Control Comes from Within

Being a glorified lab rat wasn’t all that bad, in hindsight. The healer who posted the task was polite and respectful, albeit somewhat.…passionate, over the course of the day.

I did wonder how healthcare worked here. There were no clerics or priests who channeled divine magic to heal lost limbs or anything like that, despite the repeated insistence of RPG’s and fantasy novels. People mostly just went to healers, who were a combination of modern doctors utilizing surgical procedures, and medieval apothecaries that used herbs and other natural substances. Some healers utilized different branches of magic to help in their duties, but they were more costly than the so-called ‘mundane’ or non-magical healers.

Healers, pharmacists, and doctors all referred to the same person or profession, but most people just stuck to calling them healers for simplicity.

The healer who posted the task looked somewhat older, maybe in his sixties with a short white goatee and liver spots on his hands and head. At first, he needed a subject for testing a variety of herbal pastes. I got cut with a small blade multiple times on my left arm (I insisted on my non-dominant arm) and he applied several poultices to each cut, seeing which one was most effective and how long it took to see the best effects.

While that was going on in the background, he asked for a cup of my urine to determine…something. I was pretty creeped out, but I tried to be as professional as possible, keeping my mind on the reward I’d receive after this.

The healer, who went by Vulec, pumped me so full of liquids, I was full to bursting within an hour. He went on and on about the importance of the kidneys and how their internal makeup was a fascinating something or other. I tuned him out after he dunked a cup into the ‘chamber pot’ I had just pissed in and came back with it full.

Maybe it was because I was a first-timer, or he genuinely had no other experiments, but for the rest of the day I wasn’t needed for any more testing. I basically just worked as his assistant, doing menial jobs; grinding herbs with a stone mortar and pestle, organizing his notes, and cleaning surfaces with some kind of chemical solution similar to bleach.

Eventually, the day ended, and he signed the task sheet, after he had thoroughly cleaned his hands, at my insistence. I got out of there, eager to get my pay, and practically sprinted towards the Society building. I turned in the task to the same woman who talked to me about it in the morning. She was shocked that I came back in one piece. I didn’t know if her disbelief was due to me or the reputation of the healer.

Either way, I got my well-deserved reward: Forty squares. A full triangle for a day’s work of weird medical testing. I honestly didn’t know if it was worth it or not, or whether I should do it again, as Vulec had made it clear that he and his colleagues would post tasks looking for volunteers frequently.

I had gotten off easy this time. But the workers told horror stories of people becoming disabled, losing limbs or being unable to eat, as a result of ‘assisting’ in experiments. As much as I needed the money, there were some lines I couldn’t cross. I couldn’t trade in my well-being for stacks of money. That path led to a slow, wasting death, unable to even die of your own will.

I had to temper my greed with common sense, or I would go the way of the dodo.

Well, overall today was a success. I had earned two day’s wages in a few hours, and there were still plenty of hours left in the day. I headed to the task board to see what else I could do.

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Before I was unknowingly sent to this world indirectly by a bald psychopath and his entitled girlfriend, I had heard people rant endlessly about the negative aspects of office work. Oh, you could get sued for harassment at a moment’s notice even if you’re not at fault, they said. Your boss can make you work overtime and not pay you for it. Wages were low for the rank and file, but obscenely high for the executives. You could get fired for something you said twenty years ago.

Except for maybe that last one, I could now commiserate with all of those statements.

I worked my ass off in the months leading up to springtime and the academy enrollment, and I came across nearly every terrible workplace situation possible. I picked nearly a thousand berries in the dead of night and didn’t get paid for them, as the poster claimed they had already lost their efficacy by the time I delivered them, despite the task sheet requiring them to be picked within a certain time frame. A team of mercenaries almost beat me up when the beast they were hunting dropped dead right in front of me from one of their arrows while I was searching for herbs in the forest. A noble woman accused me of indecently touching her while I was working on her husband’s estate, moving furniture.

That one pissed me off, and I almost lost my cool, but thankfully her husband was nicer than a certain bald neanderthal, and he said not to worry about it, as she was just acting out. He even paid me a couple squares (off the books, of course) to forget about it.

In every situation where I could conceivably lose my pay, the Workman’s Society stepped in for me after I reported the circumstances. Seeing as I didn’t do anything in the first place, the accused parties all paid out of pocket for their misconduct.

And by the first week of winter, I had in my possession a grand total of twelve circles.

I did break my vow of not spending money on anything besides the inn, food and drink, and frequent baths. I bought ten sets of clothes, one for each day of the week and two backups.

Each outfit consisted of a shirt, pants, and underwear that looked like a smaller version of a Scottish kilt, but without the traditional colors and pattern. They were all muted colors, and nothing was purple, which I learned from the tailor was a color that was reserved for royalty to wear.

Culture lesson aside, I was closer to my goal of sixteen circles by the beginning of spring, and I had found a few lucrative jobs to help me bridge the gap.

The first one was basically being a training dummy, and practice partner. The city guards were always looking for both new recruits, and the best methods of training them for genuine battle conditions. So my role in that process was to get pummeled by the veterans, so they would know the limits of how forceful they could be, then get sent to the healers on site, who had to fix the recruits up in as short a time as possible. The job was painful, but the healers were well-trained, and used a combination of magic and herbalism to heal me up, reducing the pain swiftly.

The next job was acting as a quasi-caretaker of the city cemetery. Nobody wanted to do that job either, though I was never told the reason why, nor was there an obvious reason. The job consisted of taking care of the grounds, watering the grass, cleaning headstones if they were present, and the two parts of the job I disliked: digging actual graves and incinerating bodies for cremation.

Apparently mages could do everything faster and more efficiently, but it seemed that no self-respecting mage would debase themselves by doing such a job.

The worst part was the actual cremation, when the family of the deceased would show up with a body, and it was placed in the magically-powered incineration chamber. The bawling and endless tears shook me the first few times, but I eventually got callous enough that at some point, it just became a minor annoyance.

The last job was utilizing my taming spell to capture animals in the forest and sell them at pet stores. I was only willing to face weaker animals, to not risk injuring myself and being unable to work later, but the pay was still good.

This was definitely the job that gave me pause, as actually breaking a tamer bond was something I had never done, before I was shown how to. After the first time presenting the beast I had tamed, the pet shop’s owner told me the process of how to do it.

That feeling of snapping was different from what I felt when Bully died, the slow fade into oblivion. After the bond was broken, another tamer, or worker in this case, would immediately tame it, as the bond breaking was disorienting for both tamer and beast, leaving no chance for the beast to resist.

The tasks paid enough that I could move past my personal feelings on it, but it was still food for thought. And it tasted…slimy.

The pet store was also where I got a lecture on the proper terminology regarding taming, which I confirmed never came with a separate space to store them, gaining me odd looks that day. My background as a ‘villager’ was revealed to the workers after I continued to ask rudimentary questions, and they were nice enough, if a bit condescending, while explaining things to me.

Animals were the basest of lifeforms with low intelligence and no ability to utilize essence. Creatures were one step above animals in the hierarchy, using the environmental essence to strengthen their bodies, but were still incapable of performing actual magic. Beasts were the top of the totem pole, showing intelligence that could range from that of a toddler to an adult human. Their bodies were intentionally enhanced with essence, and they were capable of using essence to create their own magic spells, like the deer that ‘healed’ me.

There was one term, however, that only applied to one type of entity. And using it in any other context was considered an insult, as the two were basically synonymous with each other.

The term ‘monster’ could only refer to voranders. If you called anything else a monster, and people heard you or knew about it, it was considered a taboo. Even people who got into the most heated of arguments where words turned into blows never slandered each other as ‘monsters’, maintaining that last shred of civility.

Supposedly, according to the friend of a cousin of the pet store owner’s sister’s tutor, the last person to call someone else a monster died over a hundred years ago. The cause of death?

A goddamn vorander attack on the entire town. Apparently, willingly calling someone else a monster was considered a malicious enough act that it drew in voranders like moths to a flame.

The pet store workers also said that taming spells were categorized in the branch of nature affinity magic, so it was near certain that I had nature affinity. I still didn’t know what that meant specifically, but it wouldn’t be relevant until I joined the academy, that is, if I managed to scrounge up enough coins.

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The guards never approached me about my encounter with the werewolf-looking vorander in the forest, but I heard through Ennin that they had found a vorander spawning ground somewhere in the center of the forest and burned it down, without harming the rest of the forest. Apparently that was the only way they could ensure no more monsters showed up from there ever again.

It did seem to be true, as I had never seen another one in the forest or anywhere else closeby after that day. I went into the forest frequently while doing tasks and performing various jobs, so I had firsthand experience.

I even thought about taming some of the wildlife just so I could have them on hand, as it were, in case I ran into any emergencies. But then I would get hit with thoughts of Bully dying, and I hesitated.

If I wanted to be a tamer that commanded wildlife, then I would need to become the type of person I always disliked: unfeeling, cold-blooded, callous, disregarding life, placing no importance on subordinates, and ruthless. Well, just because I already had some of those traits didn’t mean I wanted to fully commit to living like that. I doubted I could just become that type of person overnight, and if I half-assed it, I would probably be wracked with pain and guilt, emotional trauma and doubt eating away at me.

Then there was the secondary problem. Supposing I did tame a bunch of critters and kept them in my beast space, if I ever used them, I couldn’t be anywhere near other people. Anyone who saw me summon a bunch of animals and beasts out of nowhere would become very suspicious of me, and it would probably take me down a road where I ended up crucified; either ostracized and exiled from civilization, or just straight up killed out of fear I was connected somehow to the voranders.

And then came the tertiary problem. If, hypothetically, I was forced into a corner and had to unleash my stored beasts, and somebody or many somebodies saw me, I would probably end up having to kill them. As they would, referencing problem two, be either suspicious of me, afraid of me, or willing to kill me. none of which would bode well for me.

Which brought me full circle to problem one: doing any of those actions, which I would be the principal cause of, required me to have a heart of stone and ice. Cold-blooded in the most vicious way imaginable. And even if I thought it was possible for me to do that, I had enough self-awareness to know that I couldn’t live with the consequences.

I considered myself a fairly normal and sane person. Well, as normal and sane as the circumstances allowed me to be.

Sure, I could ignore the wailing of widows when I was working at the cemetery. I could be apathetic to the suffering of people half a world away. I could even, after some mental gymnastics, convince myself that taming young animals and selling them wasn’t trafficking endangered species, as there were plenty of beings of a multitude of species that I had seen in the forest.

Those were all actions that people in my old world had done, and while they may not have been completely moral, they didn’t bother my conscience so much that I couldn’t go on.

But, intentionally turning myself into some kind of unflinching, power-hungry, dominator just didn’t sit right with me. I would be basically be turning myself into that fucking bald asshole. An ambitious, greedy, shitbag who did whatever he wanted, uncaring of the consequences. That was something I knew I couldn’t live with.

So I breathed deeply, calming myself down, and put aside my ethical conundrum, focusing on the goal of gathering the fees for the academy.

In any case, putting aside my shelved plans to rule the world with an unending army of beasts, I didn’t know how many beasts could even fit in my beast space. At the moment I only had three: the green deer and two voranders. I couldn’t enter the space myself, despite repeated attempts, and I couldn’t get an estimate of how big it was, so it ultimately ended up as another question with no answer.